The foliono package Folio numbering for old books Tommi Syrjänen [email protected] Version 1.0, 25 March, 2021 Abstract The foliono package implements medieval and early modern folio numbering with a few customizable options. In folio numbering only every other page gets a number and the number has two parts that identify both the quire and the folio inside of the quire. The package works best in conjunction with the fancyhdr package but it can be used also without it. 1 Introduction Before modern page numbering was introduced, the pages of a book were numbered using folio numbering. In this context folio means a single leaf of a page, an odd page and the even page that is on the other side of. A medieval book was composed of quires. A quire is a collection of sheets of paper or parchment that are folded together to form pages. As the name suggests, most quires had four sheets that were folded to form eight folios and 16 pages, but there were also three, five, and even six sheet quires. With printed books the modern term gathering is usually used in place of quire, but I have used quire throughout because it is shorter. A medieval scribe would write the text on quires and then a bookbinder would sew the completed quires together and attach the book covers. Most texts needed more than one quire. Scribes started to number the quires to help bookbinders to keep the quires in order. They were usually marked by writing letters in alphabetical order at the bottom or top right corner of the first page of the quire. 1 \usepackage{foliono} \usepackage{fancyhdr} \pagestyle{fancy} \cfoot{} \renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{0pt} \fancyfoot[R]{\folionumber} Figure 1: Quick-start minimal code skeleton with fancyhdr. Later scribes started to add numbers for the individual folios of a quire. This was usually done for books that needed a table of contents or an in- dex. Folio numbering became more prevalent with the advent of printing as including them helped the bookbinder to ensure that the sheets were folded right and put in the correct order. For printed books the quires are formed using two basic principles. The largest book format is called folio and there the sheet is folded once so that the result has two folios and four pages. These sheets are collected in quires the same ways as manuscript sheets were. In late medieval and early modern times the number of sheets put in a quire varied also for printed books. I have seen examples ranging from three sheets (6 folios) to six sheets (12 folios), with five sheets (10 folios) being very common. In smaller format books one printed sheet usually makes up a quire by itself. In quarto size the sheet is folded twice, so a quire will have only four folios, in octavo it is folded three times so there are eight folios per quire, and in duodecimo sheets are folded four times to produce 12 folios. A medieval or early modern folio number generally consists of two parts, the quire number (A, B) and the folio number within quire in Roman numer- als (i, ii). There are some examples where the folios are numbered sequen- tially from the start with no respect to the quire structure. In many of these cases the folio numbers were added after the book had already been bound. In modern reference convention the two pages of a folio are called recto (r) and verso (v). The recto is the first page of the folio that is shown on Format Folios per quire Pages per quire Folio (2:o) 6-12 12-24 Quarto (4:o) 4 8 Octavo (8:o) 8 16 Duodecimo (12:o) 12 24 Table 1: Common old printed book formats 2 (a) Default (b) SkipFirst (c) OnlyQuire (d) NoQuires Figure 2: Mode of operation samples the right hand side of the spread and the verso is the second page on the left hand side. Bookprinters often did not include the folio number for each folio of the quire. For example, with the folio and octavo formats it was common that only the folios of the first half of a quire had numbers. Similarly, with quarto the last folio number of a quire was often left out. The foliono package supports several different folio numbering conven- tions and it also provides very rudimentary support for creating tables of content and indices for folio-numbered documents. However, a lot of manual work is necessary for creating them. In the examples I will be using the font Missaali to typeset the folio numbers as they would appear on the page. Missaali is a free opentype font that comes with the package missaali that is based on late 15th century book Northern German book textura. 3 2 Modes of operation The foliono package can operate in several different modes that are con- trolled using the package options. A folio number consists of two parts, the quire number and the folio number, and the different modes show them using different principles. Figure 2 shows four of the basic modes in schematics. Default The default behavior of foliono is that each folio is numbered with both the quire number and the folio number inside a quire. Thus, the folio numbers advance like: A 1, A 2, …, A 8, B 1, B 2, …, B 8, C 1, … Skip first folio number (SkipFirst) The first folio number skipping mode is otherwise the same as the default mode, but the first folio of a quire contains only the quire number and not the folio counter. The numbers advance like: A, A 2, A 3, …, A 8, B, B 2, …, C , C 2 … Only quire numbers (OnlyQuire) In the only quire numbers mode the folio numbers are not included at all and only the first pages of a quire have the mark: A, {}, {}, {}, {}, {}, {}, {}, B, {}, … No quires (NoQuires) In this mode the folios are numbered sequentially from the start of the book paying no regards to the quire structure. Here the numbers are simply: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, … Sheet numbering (SheetNumbering) In sheet numbering mode there is only one folio number per a two page sheet. In practice, this means that the first half folios of a quire are numbered using the default style and the latter half are left unnum- bered: A 1, A 2, A 3, A 4, {}, {}, {}, {}, B 1, B 2, … 4 This mode can be combined with skipping the first folio number. Skip end half (SkipEnd) In this mode the folio numbers are printed to the first half + 1 folios of a quire and the rest are left empty. In practice the effect is otherwise same as with sheet numbering except that one more folio has a number. For quarto format the numbers go: A 1, A 2, A 3, {}, B 1, B 2, … For octavo format the numbers are: A 1, A 2, …, A 5, {}, {}, {}, B 1, B 2, … For duodecimo they go: A 1, A 2, …, A 7, {}, {}, {}, {}, {}, B 1, B 2, … This mode can be combined with skipping the first folio number. 3 General usage The basic command in the package is \folionumber. This should be put either in the header or footer of the page and it should be run exactly once on each page since it keeps track of the folio number counters and also whether we are on recto or verso side of the folio. Manipulating headers and footers is simplest with the fancyhdr package. For the basic functionality you can add the following to the preamble of the document: \usepackage{fancyhdr} \usepackage{foliono} \cfoot{} \renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{0pt} \fancyfoot[R]{\folionumber} \pagestyle{fancy} Here the \cfoot removes the modern page number, \fancyfoot adds the folio number to the right footer, overriding the \headrulewidth removes the horizontal line from top that fancyhdr wants to add there, and \pagestyle enables the fancy header style. 5 You need to decide how big your quires are. The package defaults to eight folio quires, meaning that when printed there are four sheets in the quire. His- torically that was the most common quire size for manuscripts, but other sizes were also used. You can set the quire size with the \folionoquirefolios command. For example: \folionoquirefolios{10} sets the quires to have 10 folios and 20 pages each. It is possible to change the value in the middle of the document to get quires of different sizes. In case you need to set the folio number manually, there are two ways to do it: 1. \stepfolio: this moves the counters to the next folio. 2. \setfoliono{quireNo}{folioNo}: sets the quire counter to quireNo and the folio counter to folioNo. There are three commands that you can use to access the current fo- lio number from text. All of these commands set the folio number even if \folionumber does not print it on the page. 1. \currentfolio this sets the current folio number as unformatted string. 2. \currentfoliowithsides this sets the current folio number as unfor- matted string that is followed by the side reference r or v. 3. \currentfoliowithstyles this sets the current folio number format- ted and styled the exact same way as it is Here is an example for their use: \setfoliono{2}{4} 1: \currentfolio \\ 1: C iv 2: \currentfoliowithsides \\ 2: C iv v 3: \currentfoliowithstyles \\ 3: C iv 3.1 Font selection and properties By default the folio numbers are set using the default document font and size. There are commands that allow you to select the font when using the fontspec package.